Well over a billion people will watch Argentina go head-to-head with Spain in the 19 July World Cup final, the culmination of an enthralling five-week festival of football. The world’s greatest players have provided plenty of memorable moments. But off the pitch, the World Cup has been tarnished by corruption and human rights concerns. Civil society has worked to highlight the issues beyond the scorelines, using the tournament as a campaigning opportunity.

A host like no other

The World Cup has always been a political as well as a sporting affair. When Italy hosted just the second tournament in 1934, it used it as a propaganda vehicle for fascism and its dictator leaned on officials to ensure the home team’s triumph. When Argentina’s military junta hosted in 1978, it held the opening ceremony close to a secret detention centre where it tortured thousands of dissidents and allegedly fixed a match the national team needed to win.

FIFA, football’s unaccountable governing body, has long looked the other way as its biggest event is instrumentalised by states that abuse human rights. Now it seems determined to actively reward them. It let authoritarian Russia host in 2018, even though it had already begun the first phase of its war on Ukraine by illegally annexing Crimea. Next came Qatar, a petrostate with no sporting track record and minimal respect for human rights. Its denial of basic civic freedoms and blanket criminalisation of LGBTQI+ people didn’t trouble the FIFA executive committee members who chose it, in a selection process later revealed to be so corrupt that several officials received criminal convictions or lifetime bans. The highest price was paid by the thousands of migrant workers who died, many as a result of their work building Qatar’s World Cup stadiums.

When FIFA selected the USA as the main host of the 2026 World Cup, with Canada and Mexico staging a smaller number of games, Donald Trump was in his first term. The tournament has unfolded during his second term, during which he’s swept away the institutional guardrails that should have constrained him.

The Trump administration didn’t pause its virulent anti-immigration policies. Some countries’ players were subjected to heavy and humiliating security checks on arrival. Supporters, journalists, officials and players’ family members from around a quarter of qualifying nations faced travel bans, tightened entry rules and high visa refusal rates. The restrictions marred the atmosphere of some games where supporters of one team could fill the stadium while the other’s were hardly present. Even well-respected officials weren’t spared. Somali referee Omar Artan was refused entry.

With the Trump administration bombing Iran as the competition went on, the Iranian national team was a particular target of hostility. Around 15 coaches, administrators and officials were denied entry, along with fans and journalists. Despite playing its games in the USA, the team was forced to base itself in Tijuana, Mexico, making last-minute journeys to Los Angeles and Seattle. The disruption likely had an impact on the pitch, with the team narrowly failing to make the knockout stages. FIFA simply washed its hands, saying that immigration enforcement is the preserve of the host state.

For US-based fans, the backdrop was the ongoing campaign of mass arrests and deportations. Militarised Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers have rounded up tens of thousands of people and detained and criminalised protesters trying to defend migrants’ rights and obstruct their arrests. The crackdown had a chilling effect, with reports of migrants staying away from stadiums and watch parties for fear of being detained.

Ahead of the tournament, Trump made clear the hostility wouldn’t cease, threatening a crackdown in Los Angeles and suggesting that cities that resist his anti-migrant measures, such as Seattle, could be stripped of games. The government then used images of the US team in social media propaganda for its immigration crackdown.

The hypocrisy was off the scale when the US team’s star player, Folarin Balogun, got a red card, leaving him suspended for the next match until FIFA made the unprecedented decision to let him play. Trump unabashedly declared he’d lobbied FIFA. Balogun, brought up in the UK by Nigerian parents, only qualified to play for the USA because he was born in New York, giving him birthright citizenship. Yet even as the controversy over his suspension raged, the Trump administration pushed ahead with its attempt to end birthright citizenship, vowing to legislate in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling that upheld the constitutionally protected right. Trump’s blatant disregard for the rules everyone else has to play by was laid bare.

When civil society organisations warned of the dangers ahead of the World Cup, the White House attacked them, accusing ‘liberal activist groups’ of ‘ridiculous scare tactics’. Governments normally try to show themselves in their best light when hosting global events. But the Trump administration used the occasion to communicate that it expects the rest of the world to do what it says and doesn’t care if they don’t like it.

FIFA failings

FIFA’s head, Gianni Infantino, was a ubiquitous presence, captured on camera at most games, criss-crossing North America by Qatari private jet. He came to power in 2016, pledging to clean up the organisation after corruption scandals, but one of his first moves was to not renew the contracts of key ethics committee officials. He’s since proved to be highly accommodating of authoritarian power. In 2019, he accepted the Russian Order of Friendship medal from Vladimir Putin. Ahead of the Qatar World Cup, he minimised abuses of migrants’ rights and accused western states of hypocrisy for criticising the country’s human rights record. In an obvious ego-flattering move in 2025, he presented Trump with the newly minted FIFA Peace Prize, and in 2026 he attended the first meeting of Trump’s Board of Peace wearing a MAGA-style red cap. Any claim of neutrality is beyond credibility.

Yet FIFA has made clear it’s prepared to intervene when those involved are less powerful. It forced the Haiti team to change its shirts to remove imagery that celebrated a decisive battle in its liberation struggle against France. Its guidelines banning flags deemed political led to the confiscation of pre-revolutionary versions of the Iranian flag at stadium entrances.

FIFA’s choice of Saudi Arabia as the 2034 World Cup host, through a process engineered to make it the sole candidate, was a deeply political decision. A petrostate even more powerful and repressive than Qatar – one that murders journalists, executes dissidents and jails women’s rights activists – is set to enjoy the global spotlight. As with Qatar, there will be serious concerns about the safety of migrant workers involved in construction and the rights of LGBTQI+ supporters.

The choice of Saudi Arabia also makes clear that FIFA doesn’t take climate change seriously, despite its public commitment to become net zero by 2040. Saudi Arabia wants to pump oil for as long as possible and has consistently blocked proposals to phase out fossil fuels at COP climate talks. The current tournament, entailing numerous cross-continental journeys, has been the most polluting World Cup ever, and on top of the usual roster of climate-harming corporations, Saudi state oil corporation Aramco was its biggest sponsor. It was a prominent presence on pitchside hoardings, normalising the continuing destructive role of fossil fuels.

Civil society campaigns

Civil society hasn’t been silent. The Sport and Rights Alliance, a civil society coalition that demands human rights and labour standards, led the call for FIFA to respect rights and press for the suspension of the USA’s entry bans and strict visa conditions. The American Civil Liberties Union issued fans travelling to the World Cup with practical guidance on their rights, including what to do if stopped by ICE.

Ahead of the tournament, people protested in host cities Los Angeles, Miami and New York under the slogan ‘No ICE in the Cup’, demanding that ICE stay away from stadiums, fan zones and watch parties. Fossil Free Football, a fan-led group that campaigns to end fossil fuel football sponsorship and make the game more sustainable, highlighted Aramco’s involvement and the challenges for the competition caused by rising temperatures. Global human rights organisations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch called attention to the USA’s human rights crisis. CIVICUS’s Solidarity World Cup used the language of football to raise awareness of the civic space records of the 48 competing nations and the civil society activists several of them have unjustly jailed.

Big events like the World Cup also give civil society opportunities to shift the spotlight onto national concerns. French journalists left an empty seat in the press box at each of their country’s games to highlight the case of their fellow sports journalist Christophe Gleizes, jailed by Algeria for seven years for contact with a member of a banned group. In Mexico, one protest focused on sponsor Hyundai, over the environmental impacts of a local company that supplies it with iron ore.

Mexican campaigners used the World Cup to highlight the country’s enforced disappearance crisis. Over 133,000 people are missing, victims of organised crime and political collusion, enough to fill the vast Azteca Stadium, where the World Cup kicked off, over one and a half times. Families of the disappeared confront an indifferent state where impunity is the norm. Civil society keeps up the search for the disappeared and pressures the authorities to conduct proper investigations.

During the tournament, organisations that bring together families of the disappeared ran campaigns in the languages of supporters visiting Mexican venues and staged public displays of photos of the disappeared, including 150 by the stadium in Monterrey.

But they were met with an official response that sought to downplay the crisis, mock families of the disappeared and use violence to suppress protests. The Interior Minister implied that people were being paid to protest and announced an investigation into the funding of groups working on the crisis. In Mexico City, riot police surrounded, assaulted and detained people who attempted to march carrying images of the disappeared so they couldn’t take their protest to the stadium. The reality of disappearances didn’t fit the story Mexican authorities wanted to tell the world.

The game goes on

As the 2026 World Cup comes to a close, attention turns to the lessons for future major sporting events. Los Angeles hosts the 2028 Olympics, and the US government must be challenged to be more welcoming of the world than it has been this time. The next World Cup will principally be hosted by Morocco, Portugal and Spain, likely in fierce temperatures that will further highlight the impacts of climate change. In Morocco, the high cost of stadium construction in a context of poor public services was one of the triggers of Gen Z-led protests last year. The 2032 Olympics in Brisbane, Australia, may offer civil society an opportunity to campaign on Indigenous rights as well as the climate crisis, while human rights campaigns are a certainty in the years ahead of the 2034 Saudi World Cup.

When either Argentina or Spain lift the trophy on 19 July, the spectacle will end, but the abuses the tournament has brought to light won’t. Civil society will keep up the pressure for host nations to be held to high standards and keep working to focus public attention on the human rights problems that endure after the last whistle has blown.

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